Help us select the next book that the Mobile Read book club will read for September 2010.

The nominations will run through Aug 26 or until 10 books have made the list.
Voting (new poll thread) will run for 5 days starting Aug 26.

Book selection category for September per the "official" club opening thread is:

September 2010
Mystery/Crime

In order for a book to be included in the poll it needs THREE NOMINATIONS (original nomination, a second and a third).

How Does This Work?
The Mobile Read Book Club (MRBC) is an informal club that requires nothing of you. Each month a book is selected by polling. On the last week of that month a discussion thread is started for the book. If you want to participate feel free. There is no need to "join" or sign up. All are welcome.
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How Does a Book Get Selected?
Each book that is nominated will be listed in a pool at the end of the nomination period. The book that polls the most votes will be the official selection.

How Many Nominations Can I Make?
Each participant has 3 nominations. You can nominate a new book for consideration or nominate (second, third) one that has already been nominated by another person.

How Do I Nominate a Book?
Please just post a message with your nomination. If you are the FIRST to nominate a book, please try to provide an abstract to the book so others may consider their level of interest.

How Do I Know What Has Been Nominated?
Just follow the thread. This message will be updated with the status of the nominations as often as I can. If one is missed, please just post a message with a multi-quote of the 3 nominations and it will be added to the list ASAP.

When is the Poll?
The poll thread will open at the end of the nomination period, or once there have been 10 books with 3 nominations each. At that time a link to the poll thread will be posted here and this thread will be closed.

The Times Literary Supplement of February 3, 1921, gave the book an extremely enthusiastic, if short, review which stated that "The only fault this story has is that it is almost too ingenious". It went on to describe the basic set-up of the plot and concluded: "It is said to be the author's first book, and the result of a bet about the possibility of writing a detective story in which the reader would not be able to spot the criminal. Every reader must admit that the bet was won."

Quote from Wikipedia.org
It is also widely available free, or at very reasonable prices in a veritable rainbow of formats.

I nominate The Mysterious Affair At Styles by Agatha Christie. It is Christie's first published novel, and hence the first with Hercule Poirot.
Quote from Wikipedia.org
It is also widely available free, or at very reasonable prices in a veritable rainbow of formats.

Because the August selection is a classic noir story, I thought that I would nominate something completely different for September...So I nominate The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins.

Harry T says: "The Moonstone", published in 1868, is widely regarded as the precursor of the modern mystery and suspense novels. T. S. Eliot called it "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels"...A fabulous story. Both a classic and fun to read...

For my first nomination, I again would like to nominate "Killing Floor" by Lee Child.

Amazon Review
When Jack Reacher suddenly decides to ask a Greyhound bus driver to let him off near the town of Margrave, Georgia, he thinks it's because his brother once mentioned that the famed blues guitarist Blind Blake died there. But it doesn't take long for the footloose ex-military policeman to discover that there are plenty of strange--and very dangerous--things going on behind Margrave's manicured lawns and clean streets that demand his attention. This first thriller by a former television writer features some of the best-written scenes of action in recent memory, a crash course in currency and counterfeiting, and a hero who is just begging to be called on for an encore.

Barnes & Noble Review:
All is not well in Margrave, Georgia.
The sleepy, forgotten town hasn't seen a crime in decades, but within the span of three days it witnesses events that leave everyone stunned. An unidentified man is found beaten and shot to death on a lonely country road. The police chief and his wife are butchered on a quiet Sunday morning. Then a bank executive disappears from his home, leaving his keys on the table and his wife frozen with fear.
The easiest suspect is Jack Reacher - an outsider, a man just passing through. But Reacher is not just any drifter. He is a tough ex-military policeman, trained to think fast and act faster. He has lived with and hunted the worst: the hard men of the American military gone bad.

"An enemy to those who make him an enemy, friend to those who have no friend."

I nominate Boston Blackie by Jack Boyle. I always enjoyed the radio series about the jewel thief turned detective, and listening to his run-ins with the police who are never fully persuaded his reform is genuine. This book contains 28 chapters, and not having yet read it, I don't know if they're stand-alone short stories or an actual novel. Wikipedia says "Boyle's stories were collected in the book Boston Blackie (1919), which was reprinted in 1979 by Gregg Press," so I am assuming this 2008 Pulpville Press reprint is actually a collection of short stories. At any rate, it should be fun. Boston Blackie was one of the greats.

I'll place the third for Boston Blackie. For those who can't purchase the Kindle edition from Amazon, the 1919 version is available at Google Books. The ePub has quite a number of defects having to do with the usual scan-to-text conversions. The most notable faults are due to the drop-caps which start each chapter.